


A Bad Oak Tree

by crossingwinter



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, apologies for the coffee shop au written by someone who doesn’t drink coffee
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-27
Updated: 2018-11-27
Packaged: 2019-09-01 12:04:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,412
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16764808
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crossingwinter/pseuds/crossingwinter
Summary: An “I work as a barista in a coffee shop you frequent and I tried to make a leaf design on your coffee but it ended up being a dick instead” AU [x]





	A Bad Oak Tree

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Idlebrain](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Idlebrain/gifts).



> This is for @anidlebrain, who is the best and sent me the post in the summary with the suggestion that it would make a delightful axg au.

“Oh this is a disaster.”

Because it is.

-

She comes in every day—or at least, every day that he has a shift. She’s a good customer—always takes her headphones out when ordering, makes eye contact, sometimes even cracks a joke. Treats them like humans, you know? And not just the talking part of the coffee machine. She’s pretty, too, with dark hair and a long face and shining grey eyes that only get brighter if she stays around long enough for a second coffee. She does, sometimes. Sometimes, she is out the door and probably off to whatever it is that grad students do anyway, but sometimes she sets up in a corner for about six hours and comes back for a second latte in the early afternoon.

-

“What’s your name?” she asks as he refills her mug. (“Refill it,” she’d said, “save some water—it’s the same exact drink,” instead of getting a fresh mug.)

“Gendry,” he tells her.

“Gendry.” He likes the way it sounds on her tongue, like she’s seeing how it’ll fit in her mouth. He shouldn’t have phrased it that way. Now he’s got dirty thoughts in his mind.

“Yeah, Gendry,” he says.

“Family name?”

He shrugs. “Could be.” He doesn’t want to go into that, though. “You?”

“Arya,” she says.

“Arya.” It rolls off his tongue. He shouldn’t have phrased it that way either. “Good to meet you.”

“Yeah, and you. Thanks for the coffee.” She winks at him.

-

“Seven hells.”

“You can’t give that to a customer.”

“I know that, Lem.”

“You can’t give that to a _female_ customer.”

“I’ll pour it out and try again.”

“What were you _thinking?_ ”

-

She looks nice in that dress. She never wears dresses, not ever. It’s mostly ratty university sweatshirts that look like a dog chewed on them. Her hair’s nice too, braided neatly behind her head.

“Hot date?” he asks her as he’s pouring her an espresso. Espresso, today, and on the go.

She rolls her eyes. “My mum’s in town,” she says. “She always wants me to act more like a girl so—here we are. Girl enough for you?”

Yeah, girl enough for him. He doesn’t know what to say, especially given the way that the dress clings pretty nicely to her breasts—which she apparently _has_ , he’d thought she was pretty before realizing she had nice breasts hidden under those ratty university sweatshirts—and the swell of her hips. 

“I look like an oak tree,” she mutters. “This is the last time I ever leave shopping last minute—”

“Yeah, but a nice oak tree,” he tells her.

She blinks at him. 

“What does a bad oak tree look like?” she asks him slowly.

“Not like you,” he shrugs. He doesn’t even know what an oak tree looks like, to be honest. He’s a city boy. He knows that trees exist, and that there are breeds of them like dogs, but he has no clue what the difference is between an oak and an elm. He’s got pine. Those are the ones with needle that all his deodorant and bodywash smell like. But the rest are lost on him.

“Yeah, well,” she mutters, shrugging. Then she shudders and he hands her the coffee and she’s gone.

-

It becomes a bit of a joke. Gendry’s a bit of a glum bastard, really. He’s never made friends easily, nor particularly wanted to. But somehow it’s easy to fall into a joke with her. He writes _oak tree_ on her to-go cups when she doesn’t stick around, and she sends him a postcard with a picture of an oak—so that’s what they look like—when she’s home for the spring holidays.

_I hope you enjoy this photograph of me in my dress again._

It makes him smile. But he can’t quite get her in that dress out of his mind.

-

“It was a joke.”

“A _joke_ ? You can’t give a _female customer_ a latte with dick art on it as a joke, Gendry.”

“It was _supposed_ to be an oak leaf, like I did for Meg when she came through.”

“So you gave _another_ female customer a latte with dick art?”

-

“You draw?” Arya asks and he almost jumps out of his skin. He’d been doodling on the notepad he usually takes orders on when they’re big orders because it’s slow for some unknown reason right now and she’d snuck up on him like a cat.

“Yeah,” he says.

She cocks her head, looking at the drawing. “Cool bull,” she says.

“Yeah.” He doesn’t know what else to say.

“You’re really talented.”

“Yeah?” he promises he knows other words but he’s just a little bit blindsided by her today. She’s got her hair in a ponytail and her neck’s just—really pretty when it’s exposed like that. Gods he’s a mess.

“Did you study art?”

Gendry shakes his head. “Didn’t study much of anything.”

“Do you sell drawings at all?” she asks him and he stares at her.

“Who’d want to buy my art?”

“I would. There’re loads of websites now for artists to sell sketches and prints and stuff. If you drew wolves at all, I’d get tons of presents for my dad and brothers.”

“Wolves? What are you—a Stark?”

She doesn’t say anything.

Oh bleeding hells, she is, isn’t she?

-

“That one _did_ look like a leaf.”

“Gendry.”

“I’m throwing it out, Lem. I’m not going to give it to her.”

“Give who what? Is that my latte?”

Oh _bleeding_ hells.

-

_This is stupid,_ he thinks as he sets up an account on BlueApple and uploads his bull drawing. He’d gone to Thoros’ and made him show him how to make the background look white enough to match a coffee mug or something using his fancier photo editing software. _No one’s going to pay for this._

 _Not with that attitude, they’re not,_ he can practically hear Arya saying.

So he pops over to his Codex account and makes a post, asking people if they have any art suggestions and—to his utter shock—Beric buys a mug, and Anguy says it’d be really cool if he could do an eagle next, and Tom asks if he’d consider doing artwork for the EP he’s thinking about recording.

-

“No, it’s not,” Lem says quickly but Arya’s already seen it.

She snorts, and gives him a very bemused look. “Cheers, Gendry,” and takes the mug and that’s it.

Lem shoots him a furious look. “You’d better go after her so help me gods or I swear you’re fired.”

And Gendry doesn’t need telling twice.

-

He spends a lot of time looking up pictures of wolves on the internet. Most of the pictures he sees are either the exact same one of a wolf howling, or ones where the wolf looks ridiculous, like it’s eaten a lemon or something. But he does find one where one wolf is caught mid-leap and it looks both majestic and frightening so he goes with that and starts to draw.

And if he adds a few oak trees to the background of the drawing—well, he doubts Arya would even notice. She’s probably not going to see it anyway.

-

“Arya.”

“You always were a good artist,” she teases. Because of course she finds it funny. And not humiliating. Which only makes it more humiliating.

“Look, I’m sorry. It was supposed to be an oak leaf.”

She looks down at the very obvious dick in her coffee. “That’s not what those look like. Not even a bad oak tree has leaves like that.”

“Yeah—I was gonna redo it.”

“Although it is a very nice penis, really. Well-shaped. Girthy.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You don’t have to apologize. I think it’s funny. Though I don’t recommend doing it to all the girls, unless you’re that sort of person.”

“I’m not,” he tells her earnestly.

“Good,” she says and she lifts the latte to her lips and takes a sip, dick-tip first, and his brain bloody explodes. “Tastes good.”

No. Now his brain bloody explodes.

-

He knows it’s getting out of hand when he dreams that she’s blowing him.

Not like. Disrespectfully.

But like she’s taking his clothes off, she’s asking him to, he’s rubbing her hair and making her hum contentedly and he was definitely going to eat her out afterwards except when he comes, he wakes up.

 _You taste good,_ he thinks he remembers her saying in his dreams as he stares up at the ceiling of his dark apartment. 

It’s really getting out of hand.

-

“Gendry?” She’s staring at him and he realizes he’s just been standing there, brain exploded, for like thirty seconds.

“Want to get coffee?” he asks her.

She blinks at her. And that’s when his brain unexplodes and starts spinning dire warnings of how terrible an idea this was, and how dare he speak while it’s getting itself back together after watching Arya drink dick latte art.

“You mean like—together and not here?”

He swallows and nods, not entirely trusting himself to speak.

Her face does something very strange then. It gets soft, a little vulnerable, a little disbelieving. She chances a smile, and so does he.

“This weekend?” she asks.

“Yeah, all right.”

“Cool.”

\---

“I set up that art shop. Online.” It’s not the first thing out of his mouth. But it’s the one that makes her face light up, relax a bit, because this date has been awkward. He hasn’t known what to say, and she hasn’t known what to say and he has been regretting it—not that he’s on a date with her—but that he’d gone and done it without being fully prepared.

“Yeah?” she asks.

“Yeah,” and he digs his phone out of his pocket to show her.

-

She tastes so good, tastes like coffee and the good parts of winter and she’s so warm in his arms. She has definitely done this before, which isn’t a problem at all. He likes it, really, the way her hands are running up and down his chest, the way her eyes are shining, the way she nips at his lips, the way her hand cups him through his blue jeans.

She hums in approval of what she finds there and the only thing he can really do with that is kiss her harder, kiss her more, stumble them both towards the nearest surface—his kitchen table—so that he can lean her against something while he presses his body against hers.

-

“You did the wolves!”

“Yeah. It was a good suggestion.”

“I love it.”

He glows with the praise. He wants to say he loves that she’d suggested all this, that he’s been happier—drawing more frequently now and he’s not making a lot of money through his art, but he’s thinking about setting up some other social media accounts to try and get the word out because who knows. But he’s scared of the word _love_ coming anywhere near his stupid mouth right now, so instead he says, “Thanks.”

“For what?”

“The confidence.”

“Do people not have confidence in you?”

“I’m a thirty-year-old barista, most people think I’m a waste of time.”

“Well, they’re idiots. There’s more to a person than their job and capitalism is the worst.”

“It _is_.”

And now they’ve found something to talk about.

-

Ok the table had seemed like a good idea at the time, and he isn’t going to change tracks because that seems like a waste of valuable time, but he does get the impression it limits them. Arya is energetic, and engaged, and he does not doubt she’d like rolling around a bit more than a table allows for. But she’s a good sport about it and he’s the one who’s out of his clothes first, somehow, rubbing his dick along the seam between her thigh and hip while she sucks about ninety hickeys into his chest. She really likes his chest. He’s glad about that. He’s put some good work in, making it nice, and she can’t keep her hands off his stomach and she even takes one of his nipples into her mouth and nips at it in a way that’s really quite delightful.

Slowly, her clothes come off too and he has to pause and take a breath. Her nipples are a dusty rosy color that matches her lips, she’s slim but more importantly she’s wiry and somehow he gets the impression she’ll push him for _harder_ and _faster_ because she looks like she can take it, looks like she wants to take it.

-

One coffee date turns into two, turns into a night out to hear Tom’s—truly _terrible_ —band play a gig in the next town over.

It turns into actual oak leaves in her lattes, and him slipping her a muffin for free because he wants to feed her for some reason. 

It turns into late night conversations that manage to touch, somehow, on everything that matters, and nothing that matters at all.

It turns into the sort of friendship that Gendry had always thought people had made up when they talked about best friends—trust and openness and sarcastic comments when the other person says something dumb.

But most importantly, it turns into her grabbing him by the collar of his shirt when Lem’s not looking and pulling his lips to hers. It turns into him wrapping his arm around her shoulder—how neatly she fits under his arm, it’s like she was made to fit into his life—it turns into her waiting for his shift to wrap up just so that they can walk around campus together, because she just likes walking around with him.

-

“You’re beautiful,” he blurts out and something strange happens in her eyes again. Like she doesn’t believe him, or like she wants to.

“A nice oak tree?” she asks him.

“The best oak tree,” he replies, bending down to kiss her.

“You’re not bad yourself,” she tells him as he’s lining up to push into her.

“Yeah?

She moans as he does it, as he enters her, and god she’s perfect, how has this happened to him? Nothing good ever happens to him, but here she is, moaning as he fucks her for the first time and it’s better than a bloody dream.

“A bad oak tree.”

And he laughs, and bends his lips to kiss her, and she wraps her legs around his hips and pulls him closer.  



End file.
